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L'horizon chimérique, Op 118

Introduction

The celebratory poem of Georgette Debladis, C'est la paix, could not mask the horror of the war for Fauré or his acute awareness that far too many did not return from the fray. One of these, a cross-channel brother-in-art to Rupert Brooke and Wilfred Owen (though far less famous) was Jean de la Ville de Mirmont (1886–1914). As a frontispiece to the second edition of Jean de la Ville’s poems (1947) François Mauriac draws a touching pen-portrait of a talented fellow-student from Bordeaux – a tall, good-looking young man of the greatest sensibility. Born in a busy port, his poetry is full of dreams and fantasies concerning travel: Baudelaire-like journeys never undertaken, visits to continents as yet undiscovered and from which no vessel has ever returned. The poet died bravely in the first year of the war, leaving only a few works – Lettres de guerre sent to his parents from the front, and a slim recueil of poems. This was published in 1920 with engravings by Léon Dusouchet (one of which is reproduced here). The title of the first group of fourteen poems (from a total of forty-one) gave its name to the entire collection – L’horizon chimérique – and to Fauré’s cycle. The poems the composer chose for setting are numbered 13, 14, 11 and 5 in the poet’s sequence. Fauré might have refused to write a work celebrating the allied victory, but one feels that he wished to honour a talent from the ranks of the fallen. Very untypically he did not alter a word of the poet’s texts (although he did excise one strophe). The work was given its first performance by its dedicatee, the talented young baritone Charles Panzéra (destined to become one of the most famous of French singers) in May 1922, accompanied by his wife, Magdeleine Panzéra-Baillot.

Recordings

'Hyperion's sound is impeccable and in both his playing and accompanying essay, Graham Johnson penetrates to the heart of one of music's most subtle a ...'There can be nothing but praise for Johnson's pianism and his selection and arrangement of the songs. Volumes 3 and 4 are eagerly awaited' (The Sunda ...» More

The sea is boundless and my dreams are wild. The sea sings in the sun, as it beats the cliffs, And my light dreams are overjoyed To dance on the sea like drunken birds.

The waves’ vast motion bears them away, The breeze ruffles and rolls them in its folds; Playing in their wake, they will escort the ships, Whose flight my heart has followed.

Drunk with air and salt, and stung by the spume Of the consoling sea that washes away tears, They will know the high seas and the bracing brine; Lost gulls will take them for their own.

Jean de La Ville de Mirmont (1886-1914)English: Richard Stokes

D major (original key) 3/4 Andante quasi allegretto

In his very last creative phase Fauré rediscovers a new energy for his music (not only for the songs, but in the second Cello Sonata and the thirteenth Nocturne for piano). He emerges here from the veiled mysticism of Mirages and places his hand firmly on the tiller of life. This return to the positive, even joyful, aspects of music-making is partly encouraged by these fine poems of the sea, Fauré’s beloved medium of water: transparent and opaque, restless and peaceful, never the same from one moment to the other. (In the same way this composer’s music changes harmony imperceptibly from one chord to the next.) The moto perpetuo semiquaver accompaniment of this song is a good example of this ‘sea-change’ – undramatic yet teemingly eventful, and demanding enough to sink even the best sight-reader. The infinite vistas of the horizon are mirrored by the implacable rise of the vocal line through an entire octave. In Accompagnement and Mirages we have encountered the eerie stillness of lakes; here we rediscover a composer not shy of suggesting the buffeting of real waves at climactic points (as at ‘Ivres d’air et de sel’); the composer, at home in this amalgam of reverie-fantasy and vigorous determination, revels in his starring role in ‘The Old Man and the Sea’, avant Hemingway. The inspiration of Panzéra’s voice (broader and richer than any typical salon singer) must have played its part in encouraging the composer to paint with a broader brush dipped in testosterone. The result remains utterly Fauréan, but the music itself seems less self-conscious, more accessible, than many of the third-period songs.

I have embarked on a ship that reels And rolls and pitches and rocks. My feet have forgotten the land and its ways; The lithe waves have taught me other rhythms, Lovelier than the tired ones of human song.

Ah! did I have the heart to live among you? Brothers, on all your continents I’ve suffered. I want only the sea, I want only the wind To cradle me like a child in the trough of the waves.

Far from the port, now but a faded image, Tears of parting no longer sting my eyes. I can no longer recall my final farewells … O my sorrow, my sorrow, where have I left you?

Jean de La Ville de Mirmont (1886-1914)English: Richard Stokes

D flat major (original key) 3/4 Andante moderato

In this farewell to his beloved key of D flat major, Fauré matches and illumines the obsessive wanderlust of the poet. The accompaniment almost overuses the insistent dotted quaver + semiquaver figuration that launches the music and propels it forward (except in the remarkable cradling music at the end of the second verse, a welcome respite, and one of the composer’s most inspired use of hemiola – the ear is led to hear six bars of 2/4 instead of the four bars of 3/4 that appear on the page). Although Ville de Mirmont has a large sailing ship in mind the composer harks back to his Chanson du pêcheur, Barcarolle and Accompagnement by creating a bass-clef motif that suggests an oar plying its way through water. This is the oar of the imagination cleaving through the constraints that keep the poet grounded on dry land and it gives the song terrific thrust and momentum. Fauré chooses to end on a most untypical note of pathos (‘Ô ma peine, ma peine’), something that a larger-than-life singer like Panzéra could carry off with conviction because of that ‘extra physical dimension that organizes, surpasses and overturns the whole cultural part of music’ (Roland Barthes, writing of this artist’s powers). This is another way of saying that singers with the finest voices and visceral instincts can break the rules, shocking by the tastes of the over-refined salon, but communicating on a wider level. Ville de Mirmont provides a last strophe, cut by the composer, which announces the poet’s departure for a destination beyond the Antilles. He asks whether his heart (which is the only cargo he will take with him) will appeal to the savages as a cheap trinket. It is a line that might have raised a rueful smile – not suitable for the atmosphere bordering on melodrama created here for a singer like Panzéra.

Diana, Selene, moon of beautiful metal, Reflecting on us, from your deserted face, In the eternal tedium of sidereal calm, The regret of a sun whose loss we lament.

O moon, I begrudge you your limpidity, Mocking the fruitless commotion of wretched souls, And my heart, ever weary and ever uneasy, Longs for the peace of your nocturnal flame.

Jean de La Ville de Mirmont (1886-1914)English: Richard Stokes

E flat major (original key) Lento ma non troppo

This hymn to the goddess Diana is the last in a line of evocations of antiquity threading its way from Lydia to Pénélope; in the chords of the infinite calm of the song’s opening we can also detect an echo of the noble beginning of Duparc’s Phydilé. This is also Fauré’s last vocal nocturne, simpler and more direct than many of the others. The accompaniment consists of deceptively laconic crotchet chords which glide without haste, implacably determined nevertheless. This circular progress from the opening to the closing E flat chords seems a journey charted in the stars (one thinks of another sailor’s hymn to sidereal beauty, Schubert’s Lied eines Schiffers an die Dioskuren). For his vocal line Fauré has somehow conjured a memorable tune out of the unremarkable inflections of speech. In this vast calm of this picture the tiniest details seem significant, such as the clash, the glint of ‘beau métal’, between B flat and A natural in the pianist’s hands. This is one of many such touches: the drop of fourth on ‘perte’ (of no account in most songs, here utterly bereft); an address to the moon (‘Ô lune, je t’en veux de ta limpidité’), where the baritone voices his plea in a higher and lighter tessitura. As the accompaniment’s single pair of quavers stirs in a sea of crotchets, ‘agité’ is contrasted with ‘paix’ (the harmonization of which unfurls like a white flag and prepares the way for the truce of the closing cadence). It is little wonder that this poem was so fitted to Fauré’s purpose: the words ‘mon cœur, toujours las et toujours agité’ express a central paradox in the composer’s life and career.

Ships, we shall have loved you to no avail, The last of you all has set sail on the sea. The sunset bore away so many spread sails, That this port and my heart are forever forsaken.

The sea has returned you to your destiny, Beyond the shores where our steps must halt. We could not keep your souls enchained, You require distant realms unknown to me.

I belong to those with earthbound desires. The wind that elates you fills me with fright, But your summons at nightfall makes me despair, For within me are vast, unappeased departures.

Jean de La Ville de Mirmont (1886-1914)English: Richard Stokes

D major (original key) 12/8 Andante quasi allegretto

The composer does not attempt here anything as complicated as in the last of the Venetian songs or the concluding item of La bonne chanson – both of these had cleverly incorporated themes from earlier songs of their respective sets. But for the closing song of L’horizon chimérique we do return to the D major of the opening song of this cycle, and the second number of the set is recalled in a modified recapitulation of its rhythmical emphases. This is more of a berceuse than the other songs, but it is a lullaby on a grand scale, though much less suave than Les berceaux. The waves are allowed to roll between the hands in a way that looks back to the early Chanson du pêcheur. Here a man of seventy-seven seems able to summon as much youthful ardour as necessary. This may seem at first hearing to be a song of action, but its poignancy lies in its unfulfilled longing. The poet, who never fulfilled his desire to travel the world, remains land-locked with the ageing composer whose life is drawing to a close. Already very frail, Fauré assures us that he too has many great new departures left in him; had his health permitted we cannot doubt that his musical mind would have continued to evolve – the Piano Trio (1922–23) and String Quartet (1924) are proof of this. But this was his last song (we were cheated of a Ronsard setting, destroyed by Fauré in 1924 because Ravel happened to have selected the same text – an unhappy coincidence). So it is here that we must leave the composer of mélodies. Peering into distant horizons he slips from sight without a fuss; distrusting rhetoric, he softens his final bold cadence with a decrescendo. On leaving his desk for the war Jean de la Ville de Mirmont left a line which applies to both of this cycle’s collaborators: ‘Cette fois, mon cœur, c’est le grand voyage.’